First brainstorming ideas

On Friday we had our first session of brainstorming mathematical ideas that could be turned into shirty sculptures. Although there wasn’t a good turnout of mathematicians (academics all seem to be away over the summer!) we had lots of ideas emailed to us beforehand so there was plenty to think about.

Take a look at the ideas below and let us know which ones you like best!

– Design a pattern on the shirt which can only be seen when viewed from a particular angle, illustrating work done on integrable systems where a function only looks linear when transformed into the correct coordinates;

– Sew shirts together to incorporate a particular group structure or symmetry, for example the dihedral group;

– Create a ‘hypershirt’, that is, a 3-dimensional representation of a 4-dimensional hypercube;

– Cut a disc out of the front of a shirt and re-sew to illustrate a solution to a puzzle (how to tile the disc with congruent tiles so that at least one tile does not touch the centre);

– Use stuffing to create a 3-dimensional surface representing a particular statistical distribution;

– Cut a shirt into strips and re-assemble using random rules, for example by throwing dice to determine how many strips of a particular colour are used;

– Find a shirt with widely spaced vertical lines, then sew matchsticks on to find an approximation to pi using Buffon’s needle method;

– Use a t-shirt with a distinctive design and cut parts out of it, asking whether the public can guess what the missing pieces are. Image reconstruction is a big topic being explored by mathematicians in Edinburgh!

– Cut a shirt into strips and re-assemble into a Kakeya set – a picture which contains a line of length 1 in every direction. Amazingly, it is possible to do this so that the picture has as small an area as you want!